“We can’t be surprised with what kids do with idle time. And that’s sort of one of the things — when we look at crime rates and all that sort of stuff, it’s like, these are a bunch of bored kids that are unsupervised who don’t know how to play. If we start there — and then we give them a gun. And then you’ve got such a lethal combination.” – First lady Michelle Obama, quoted in Michelle O: Bored kids get guns and ‘just go off on society’ [via washingtonexaminer.com]
So even the first lady agrees that it isn’t the presence of the gun that causes crime, especially in the inner cities. Thank you Michelle for speaking the truth, even if it was unintentional.
“the presence of the gun that causes crime”
This is of course sarcasm, right? You cannot actually believe that?
So a spoon makes Rose O’Donnel fat? Your television forces you to sit around all day watching it?
Reading, my friend
My bad, apologies. Totally missed that ‘n’t’ part.
Never mind. 🙂
You need to re-read that comment.
Oh JC! Has the progressive’s dumbing down of society through government schools been far more effective than I fear?
ISN’T = is not.
Good Grief.
Sorry man, I am guilty. Read right over that one.
Apology gladly accepted. Admitting to a mistake is becoming sadly increasingly rare in our civilization and good people are not afraid to do so.
She does blame the gun. She said it was part of a “lethal combination”.
You could get them jobs…. but campaigning for 15 bucks an hour is going to make it difficult for teenagers to enter the workplace.
But with a $15 living wage, all those teenagers can support families. /sarc/
So we need common sense anti boredom laws now? Need a new alphabet agency to enforce it and baby sit the unsupervised children.
How about year round school 6 days a week? That would give them something to do and maybe they’d learn something?
For different reasons, but I do agree that year-round school makes more sense than the system we use now.
I remember summer vacations spent outside playing. Now that we’re in Houston, the kids spend summer vacation indoors, dreading being outside (if not at the pool). And I can’t blame them.
Switching to year round school would be a huge boon to the health of every student in the Houston area. It’s like administrators want kids to be fat. I suppose they just hate children.
Vacation isn’t just for the kids at school, Katy.
Some teachers like the job for that extended time off to do whatever the hell teachers do in that time, like traveling, for example…
I like the Japanese system of 5.5 days per week with no holidays longer than a week or two.
Yep, make sure they are catching up on all the Marxist dogma they are missing by ditching school.
Perhaps PP could build more clinics in the high crime ghettos and offer the welfare queens cash up front for the parts. Fewer babies to grow up to be ‘bored’ thugs committing crime. Just saying.
When I first saw that picture, it looked like all she had on was the jacket…
Same here. Lol
She’s disgusting
As the joke goes, Obama did promise us a classless society.
Same here on that one too.
No, Michelle, these are a bunch of fatherless young men, who come from homes destroyed by decades of liberal policies aimed at ‘fighting poverty’, but which, like most government policies, have had unintended consequences. As per usual, when the government picks winners and losers, it skews the social demographics towards the group that was the ‘winner’. Hence, most black people think it’s perfectly natural to be essentially adult wards of the state. The outliers are those people proud enough to steer their own course and stand up for themselves. They don’t have time to be ‘bored’. They’re too busy supporting the ‘bored b@$7@rd children’ of single moms who are for all practical purposes institutionalized on the streets of America.
I agree except I wouldn’t say “black people” because there are actually more white people in those programs. More accurate would be “inner city” or just “poor”.
But “poor” in America is not really poor. We should send our “poor” to Asia or south of the border to see what poor really is.
You got that right! I laugh when I hear some idiot sitting on a porch in his new Air Jordans whining about his life!
Give us some percentages Owen, not just vague assertions about raw numbers. I know what my eyes see.
the population of juveniles on probation in the County i serve in PA:
2.5:1 African American to Caucsian.
so out of the 400 youth my program serves daily about 250 are AA. And idle time is caused by single parents, many on drugs, and no educational insistence.
“bunch of bored kids that are unsupervised”
Kids! Good gravy. These kids are 17 and 18 and 25 and up.
Take away the food stamps and the unemployment checks and force them to get jobs like the rest of us. Lock away those who commit violence for good. How much actual good this would do for society and for these ne-er do wells individually? Loads of good, and it’s criminal that these solutions will not be looked at. The state will keep on taking more and more money from the taxpayer and redistributing it (keeping most of if for themselves of course) out there to keep this practice of unsupervised ‘kids’ going.
It’s sad that even as she is partly right her argument is made such as to deflect blame from where it really lies; with the state and the people who support this welfare scam.
Well, no. If we were to abolish “welfare,” i.e., food stamps, HUD Section 8 housing, TANF, SSI, and other income transfers, the poor, bored, unsupervised little darlings would just burn all of our cities to the ground and engage in orgy of looting and violence. Of course, that’s going to happen eventually anyway, so we might as well get it over.
You guys do know that it’s more white people in there and then black right. Also I’m black and I have my bachelor’s degree I never did a crime in my life
Did that degree teach you critical thinking skills? The only reason there are more poor whites is because there are more white people in this country. Per capita black America is the largest recipient of welfare. You also need to look at the demographics. Poor whites wouldn’t burn cities because a) they don’t do shit like that (or was the contrast on my TV up too high during Baltimore and Ferguson) and b) they don’t live in cities but instead live mostly in rural Appalachia.
No one here is criticizing educated, employed black folks. Ever.
Denial of the existence of the huge number of bottom feeders appears to be racially institutionalized.
“Deuce says:”
There are plenty of stupid white people who do loads of stupid things, including rioting and burning things to the ground.
Crime is crime and when it happens the people making it happen need to be punished, irregardless of their race.
Who does it more and why is a subject for someone else to analyze, sociology is a complex thing and frankly not something that interests me. To think white people don’t do these things is incorrect.
Did anyone say you were a bad guy? Or all blacks are bad? No. They pointed out an undeniable fact, black society in America is riddled with generational poverty, welfare, crime, violence, maleducation, high birth rates and high mortality of age groups not normally associated with high mortality. Basically, black America is screwed right up.
High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination. The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans — and of African American control of city governments. The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent and dysfunctional cities in the United States today are run by leftist blacks.
Nobody can possibly offer any suggestions to solve for the problem until all the butthurt about identifying that there is a problem can be left behind… Particularly by those ‘s that manage to utterly refute the stereotypes of their ethnicity.
Great you’re black and successful. So farking what. You’re not solving the problem with butthurt whining to a bunch of crackers. Pro-tip: They don’t care. A bunch of them have degrees and never committed a crime. You don’t see them defending white trash with arguments about how they themselves are not white trash despite being white. Folks gotta learn that you can’t hold yourself up as a paragon of virtue when you’re not the one being derided because the assertion is a non-sequitur.
Oh right Mr. 308, I forgot about all the white people burning their cities down every time a cop shoots a meth head trying to stab them. I don’t know how I could have forgotten; it’s happened like 6 times in the last two years.
“the poor, bored, unsupervised little darlings would just burn all of our cities to the ground”
Well maybe so, but that’s not a reason to keep on giving them ca$h.
Lock up people who commit crimes, and keep them locked up, that is what needs to be done about that. And I did mention that originally.
Wow, I’ve heard some dumb crap before, but this is up there.
Yeah. Has nothing at all to do with money, status, street-cred, women or power.
I spent the first half of my life in the ghetto. These kids all have video game consoles, basketball courts and parks, libraries, seemingly endless free “cultural festivals”.
If they’re bored it’s because they’re choosing to be bored. Or it’s just more fun to make easy money selling dope, father a dozen bastards and roll dice behind the Circle K.
Headline: Michelle Obama supports forced youth labor to prevent crime
Democrats. Democrats never change. ?
Shame on all of us gun owners, walking around, handing guns to bored children.
Maybe she meant her and Barack when she said “we”.
This is a racist remark. It implies that black youth are prone to violence since she claims bored white and Asian kids don’t to turn to violence.
Actually, she never mentioned what race these children belong to… ?
I know, I know, she referred to the south side of Chicago.
I think it’s funny how she’s talking about kids not playing duck, duck, goose and broken swingsets. They’re not 8, lady!
More like: duck! Duck! Now return fire!
Funny, leftists never do mention race, do they?
Maybe we could use Gameboys to fight crime? Oh boy when the batteries get low though! They’ll start picking up the guns again. It’s kinda like how you know the weather’s warm in Chicago when the body count starts rising.
Seriously though, really? It’s not the lack of parenting, poverty cycles or revolving door justice for gang members that discourages them from changing their ways?
First lady Michelle Obama on Tuesday linked the lack of youth sports and playgrounds to higher crime and even gun violence.
Remember the Clinton era drive to make youths play basketball instead of shooting each other?
How did that work out?
(seriously, I don’t recall any mention of the results of that program)
NPR says that Midnight Basketball was the only Clinton anti-crime measure that worked.
http://www.npr.org/2014/09/12/347736999/20-years-later-major-crime-bill-viewed-as-terrible-mistake
NewsOK said Midnight Basketball helped improve gang cohesion and increased gang related crime.
http://newsok.com/article/2510906
Great idea. Let’s enroll at-risk youths into a sports program that begins at midnight. That’ll improve their grades. Most A students can be found shooting hoops at 2 AM on school nights.
Hmmm, there was no challenge in “playing” with my father’s hunting rifles. Sure, the ammo was on the top shelf of the closet, but I was used to climbing to get what I needed. However, I was taught at an early age those weren’t my toys to play with. If there was a handgun in the house, I never knew about it.
Recess ends after elementary school.
First lady Michelle Obama on Tuesday linked the lack of youth sports and playgrounds to higher crime and even gun violence.
Remember the Clinton era drive to make youths play basketball all night instead of shooting each other?
How did that work out?
Hmm, NPR says that Midnight Basketball was the only Clinton anti-crime measure that worked.
http://www.npr.org/2014/09/12/347736999/20-years-later-major-crime-bill-viewed-as-terrible-mistake
NewsOK says Midnight Basketball helped improve gang cohesion and increased gang related crime.
http://newsok.com/article/2510906
Yeah – I guess it is good that she’s blaming social conditions rather than just “the evil (inanimate object) gun made them do it.” Maybe this is “progress”.
But my counter is, “OK, then why is it when we were utterly bored kids growing up out in the sticks we just shot and blew up stuff in the woods for fun, but never once did we consider actually hurting another person?”
But we had places to shoot our guns, and motorcycles to get us around when we were kids.
So, what we need is subsidized inner-city ranges for da yoots, and knock a few of the abandoned houses down and put in a motocross track.
I’m only half joking.
I would also contend that there is a lack of pride/shame. Many of the urban poor, poor, or whatever we want to call them have been on the dole for generations, and they have no problem with that. Now I’m not saying that one should necessarily be ashamed to have to make use of food stamps, welfare or whatever…assuming they actually need to. All of these programs were originally designed to be temporary measures, to get folks over the hump. Instead they have become permanent fixtures and you now have some families who have been living off of the state for decades. What’s more there is an attitude of entitlement and trying to figure how to get even more out of the state. Take pride in yourself, aspire to get out of Section 8, work a straight job, any job in order to pay your way. Get married and then have children. All these things are cyclical. Instead so many of the urban poor, poor black youth, or whoever don’t see the benefits of that type of lifestyle and go the way so many of them gone before. It sucks.
So give them an XBox or an iPad instead… or better yet, give them a job. All of these options are better than trying to take away guns from people other than them in the first place.
I swear these people seem so thick it’s hard to imagine they have anything other than the goal of disarmament for disarmament’s sake… or a more sinister sake, but it’s too early in the morning for the tinfoil hat.
I’m young, own guns, and sometimes get bored. Haven’t had the urge to kill anyone.
Wow. Our leaders talk to the public like we’re 9 year old children…..but then again, maybe the public dumbing down has been that successful.
She gets it from her husband. The Obamas are very condescending to anyone who debates their beliefs.
Apparently she has a remarkably low opinion of the importance of parenting and moral training/standards. She seem s to agree with her husband that what a person does is not their responsibility but is the result of the influence of the “village” / goverment. Hmm, does that make it her hustbands fault?
So was yer hubby Barry bored when he was a youthful drug dealer Moo-shell? Or trying for street cred? I’ll be happy when these clowns leave 1600 Pa. ave. Yeah that IS an odd outfit…
The left is so out of touch with reality it’s ridiculous. Boredom causes gun violence, climate change causes terrorism….what the hell is wrong with these people?
Basically, she’s saying that inner city kids are too stupid to figure out some way to entertain themselves without shooting each other.
You know, I was bored plenty of times as a kid. I remember complaining to my mom (bad idea, she put me to work) and times when my friends and I couldn’t agree on what would be fun to do. The thing is, I never thought it would be fun to get a gun and kill Mr. Wilson next door or the kid down the street. If killing somebody is these kids’ solution to boredom, then they have far more serious problems than boredom.
She makes it sound like guns are just falling out of the sky. These “kids” have to go through a good amount of seedy individuals to get an illegal gun. It doesn’t just happen cause they have nothing better to do.
I can see bored inner kids breaking windows and doing other petty crime but murder and armed robbery are very rarely a spur of the moment thing.
Isn’t she supposed to be a person of well above average intelligence and this is the best BS excuse she can put forth? I guess she demonstrated her intelligence by NOT suggesting the solution was more play ground equipment.
She looked like a packrat storing two eggs in her cheeks and her teeth are trying to run away from her face.